Microsoft Data Insights Summit 2017 Day 2 Recap

It’s a wrap! The Microsoft Data Insights Summit is officially over but that doesn’t mean that we cannot continue enjoying the amazing content, sessions, and community activities that happened between Monday and Tuesday. Let’s try to summarize the day again (even if we can’t do it justice).

Closing Keynote

The closing keynote was delivered by Freakonomics authors Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt at 2:30 p.m. PT and it did delight us all. Attendees were already excited in social media as we waited for Stephen and Steven to come out to the stage. After Kamal Hathi’s introduction, they got a very warm welcome as expected.

Let’s say that the “Turkey subject” got everyone’s attention out of the gate but when the renowned authors described that “storytelling is the sugar that makes the meaning of data (medicine) go down better”, the idea hit home with the audience big time. And of course, one specific piece of advice got a lot of attention too: if your organization doesn’t value data after all your efforts, passion and time invested then it’s better to quit. There’s a shortage of people with data skills and you should be happier after moving on. Just like that.

Session highlights

In line with the first day, sessions kept pouring on Tuesday. Between keynotes, breakouts and workshops there were more than 40 sessions during the day for attendees to enjoy.

Community

The community lounge kept its popularity on Tuesday. Thousands of prize wheel spins and swag given away, including the Microsoft Flow and PowerApps teams classic Surface Book giveaway. Congrats to our lucky winner!

The Datanauts kept lurking around the summit to fight byters and give attendees points to be exchanged for swag. They even had their own live report to inform everybody on stats, rankings and space ranks as part of the competition.

The community theatre also kept working full steam ahead during the day, showcasing partners and community members in 20-minute sessions.

Bottom line: non-stop fun. Period. We cannot wait to do this again!

In the meantime, if you like what you saw (or read here) and you haven’t already, go ahead register in the community to participate in our virtual activities and events. If you got one of the thousands of pieces of swag we gave away at the lounge, let us know with a photo using the hashtag #MSDataSummit.

Ask the experts

Even after a full day of questions, these appointments were still on high demand. So much to the point that after the conference was officially over, experts and attendees were still around answering and answering questions. Big kudos to our product teams for their passion and commitment to help our users and fans to get as much as they needed from the summit. Same goes to our community of passionate users. Keep those questions and feedback coming!